All of these intrusions are variations of the oldest virus vectors - execution fishing (making bytes from a read file look like an executable), address execution (telling the processor to execute a command found at a certain location), and unrestricted execution (allowing a processor to execute a command, even if it's not part of the current task). I'll admit that those are simplistic descriptions for some complex ideas, but it's basically what a lot of these attacks boil down to. They've been around since the 80's. They don't seem the same, but honestly they all come back to a few concepts executed in new places (pipelines and predictors), with new tools and a greater understanding of core design and core-specific assembly language. Hackers are just getting more sophisticated at finding ways to perpetuate them.
Would a CPU manufacturer like Intel be dumb enough to allow address execution and unrestricted execution happen inside their hardware? Sure they would - would a company like Microsoft be dumb enough to create Internet Explorer 6?
Is AMD as vulnerable? Probably not, or the Intel supporters would have demonstrated it by now. It's not hard to force your hardware to keep track of the executables it loads, it's not hard to make it refuse to execute anything it finds in a data stream, and it's not hard to double check if an instruction was a logical result of a previous instruction. But those activities use processor cycles and they use more cache. AMD might have built a design where most of those things didn't happen.
Why hasn't Intel fixed all this in hardware? It might not be that simple. Some fixes could require a reworking of their schema, or even reworking the formulary of their asm.
P.S. Hot DAMN, I love it when I talk like a know-it-all! I'm rubbing the bottom side of my keyboard right now!
Would a CPU manufacturer like Intel be dumb enough to allow address execution and unrestricted execution happen inside their hardware? Sure they would - would a company like Microsoft be dumb enough to create Internet Explorer 6?
Is AMD as vulnerable? Probably not, or the Intel supporters would have demonstrated it by now. It's not hard to force your hardware to keep track of the executables it loads, it's not hard to make it refuse to execute anything it finds in a data stream, and it's not hard to double check if an instruction was a logical result of a previous instruction. But those activities use processor cycles and they use more cache. AMD might have built a design where most of those things didn't happen.
Why hasn't Intel fixed all this in hardware? It might not be that simple. Some fixes could require a reworking of their schema, or even reworking the formulary of their asm.
P.S. Hot DAMN, I love it when I talk like a know-it-all! I'm rubbing the bottom side of my keyboard right now!